When, within the first ten minutes or so of the movie starting I saw a head sawed in half vertically and the skin peeled off, THEN I remembered that this was a J. G. Ballard story. I do not like J. G. Ballard stories (except perhaps for Empire of the Sun). This was a dystopian, violent nightmare of a movie that I didn’t understand one little bit.
All those four and five star ratings! No, this was too bleak and ugly for this little old lady. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it.
I am a big JG Ballard fan, so thank you for bringing this movie to my notice. Given how you felt about it, well done for apparently sitting through to the end!
I knew that there are Ballard fans, and I assume that they really embraced this film. If you ever see it, I’d be interested to know how you found it.
I also loathe dystopian, violent nightmares, in literature and especially in visual media. So why go to one??
The reason I go to and more particularly read dystopian movies/fiction is that the dytopias of 1990’s SF are rapidly coming into being – the replacement of nation states by corporations, the total control of all our data by corporations, the return of extreme disparities (in the first world) between wealth and poverty, the gutting of the lower middle class (clerical) and upper working class (trades) and so on.